The suspension of disbelief, that parsimonious concept that allows an audience to put up with the inconsistencies of plot, begins with a voluntary gesture. T.S. Eliot called it “the bewildering moment,” writing, more generously than most, that in order to understand a work of art, “you have to give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say, before you have wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery.”

Instead of the reader’s flickering disbelief, two new novels from the Spanish toy with the disbelief of the authors themselves. Javier Marìas and Cèsar Aira, two of the most exciting authors to appear in English in recent years, put the question like this: Do they — or their narrators — believe in the story they are telling? Are they having to force themselves?

“The Man of Feeling” (New Directions, 208 pages, $13.95), a minor work by Mr. Marìas, in paperback for the first time, states this conceit quite explicitly. Having dreamed about how he met his mistress, the narrator, an opera tenor, awakens to find she has fled. He sits down to transcribe his dream, thereby remembering and perhaps reinterpreting the affair that has abruptly ended. He even skips breakfast, he says, lest it chase away his reverie — “it is only through that second awakening, that of the stomach, that you can entirely leave behind you the darkness and the nocturnal realm.”

Realms of uncertainty are dear to Mr. Marìas. His style is characterized by its attitude of suave conjecture, a slightly orotund note with a sinister undertone. His narrators must never be entirely sure of what they are talking about. In “The Man of Feeling,” for example, our opera singer imagines what happens when his mistress returns, at night, to her rich husband:

How would Natalia Manur enter their luxury room? In the dark, her elegant Della Valle or Prada shoes dangling from two of her long, gnarled fingers in order not to disturb the exhausted banker’s repose, or, rather, to avoid answering questions?

A dedication to detail, to shoe brands, to those uncanny gnarled fingers that were explained earlier in the book, and to the permutations of possibility — all this contributes to the signature Marìas effect. When the narrator pays such insatiable attention to the world, the world becomes unstable, wobbling; we cannot take our eyes of it.

In “The Man of Feeling,” the great object of consideration is love, something most real, perhaps, when anticipated or remembered. “Let us say it is a feeling which always demands an element of fiction beyond that afforded by reality,” Mr. Marìas writes. It requires a suspension of disbelief.

In “How I Became a Nun” (New Directions, 128 pages, $13.95), Cèsar Aira has created an allegory about how he became a writer, or at least about how he lost touch with reality. At a very young age, while recovering from cyanide poisoning, the young Cèsar reports that “something had broken inside me, a valve, the little safety device that used to allow me to switch levels.” This phrase, which goes out on a limb with its metaphysical precision, will remind readers of Mr. Aira’s previous book, “An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter” (2006).

The reader will eventually puzzle out that the young Cèsar, though he refers to himself as a girl, is only stubbornly pretending. Acutely aware of how his imagination pushes against reality, he judges the world according to its passivity before that imagination:

It’s hard to have a romantic idea of what a prison will be like, even if you don’t know what romanticism is (I certainly didn’t). To tell the truth, I didn’t know what a prison was either. This one was steeped in an intense, destructive realism, strong enough to dissolve all preconceived ideas, whether you had any or not.

Too smart but also too childish, Mr. Aira’s best moments here are hampered by the coy situation he has created.

Toward the end of this very short book, we get another glimpse of the idea of “switching levels.” Young Cèsar is about to give some examples, but he regrets he will have to leave the level of pure assertion. To give examples is to admit that parallel cases exist, and to admit that the world of pretend is not real enough to exist on its own.

blyal@nysun.com